Beyond The Religion's

1. Religion is limited by our human understanding. Spiritual truth is as wide and broad as the mind of God.
2. Religion is the place where we learn the basics about God. But those lessons are couched in very elementary concepts. In the same way that we are intended to move beyond grammar school into ever higher levels of learning, so we must be willing to move beyond childhood concepts and embrace the larger truths that God continually offers us.
3. We have a body which will eventually die, and a soul which will live forever because it is part of God. As a result, we have two sets of senses, the five which connect us with the physical world and others that connect us with the spiritual world (intuition, dreams, visions, psychic abilities, etc.) Religion is an expression of the physical side of our nature, while spirituality is connected to our divine nature.
4. Religion is an attempt to convert a vision of the invisible, eternal world into symbols and practices which we can understand. But the problem is that we tend to invest those symbols and practices with divine authority and eventually worship the traditions we ourselves have created. This important concept is called idolatry.
5. Religion is trapped in its own past. Over the years it has developed a point of view about God which it considers complete and final. As a result, it spends most of its time defending that vision and protecting itself against any new revelations which might upset its system of belief.
6. Jesus made the statement that he has much more to tell us. But many who claim to be his followers are not interested in what he still has to say to us because they are afraid that any new idea will upset their neat little closed system.
7. Religion is by definition an effort to understand and therefore to please God. Religion began in primitive times with a recognition that the most important things in life are out of our control-life, death, weather, crops, health, the future, etc.
8. Recent revelations about sinful practices in the church and the leadership's attempts to cover up those crimes underlines the fact that the church is often motivated, not by a love for God and his people, but by a desire for power and the need to protect that power. The church has become so saturated with politics that it tends to forget its basic purpose, to speak in self-forgetful love for God.
9. The church cannot speak for God when it has quit listening to the voice of God. It often mistakes its traditional confessions of faith for the authentic will of God.

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